A Certain Arrogance

Providing the first global cultural context for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this investigation into how United States intelligence agencies and other entities manipulated liberal religious groups and educational institutions for ideological, political, and economic gain during the Cold War exposes numerous previously misunderstood political operations. Including assassinations, these projects include those facilitated by Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, the U.S. State Department, the Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA, and other individuals and groups. Focusing on the manipulations of key individuals in the American Unitarian Association, the Unitarian Service Committee, and the Unitarian-supported Albert Schweitzer College by covert American interests during the Cold War, this exposé asserts that an unwitting Lee Harvey Oswald—an asset and pawn of American intelligence—was the ideal scapegoat in a tragically successful conspiracy to murder President Kennedy.

A Certain Arrogance is a reticulation of eight essays on the history of international intelligence (primarily U.S. espionage), on Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles and their manipulation of religious groups and individuals to achieve U.S. elitist goals, on the development of U.S. psychological warfare operations, and on the sacrifice of Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. American Spymaster Allen Dulles, based in Switzerland, had abused religious (largely Protestant) individuals and institutions for U.S. intelligence through two World Wars and the subsequent "Cold War." His brother John Foster Dulles also used major religious groups (again, largely Protestant) from 1937 through 1959 to further both his own and the American establishment's political and economic goals. One religious individual, Noel Field (American Quaker, Unitarian, and Marxist) was used by Allen Dulles to manipulate religious relief organizations in World War II and in the post war period. Dulles finally utilized Field to help destabilize Communist Eastern Europe. Dulles apparently collaborated in this plan with Jozef Swiatlo, a Communist/CIA double agent, who later surfaced in the Warren Commission's Kennedy assassination investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald. Swiss based Albert Schweitzer College had major religious origins that were both social and political. Post war liberal Protestant movements in Europe, including the International Association for Religious Freedom, helped to create the college in Switzerland, the country at the center of Allen Dulles' fifty year spy program. In the United States, the college was supported by a powerful coalition of American religious liberalism, primarily the Unitarian Church, the Unitarian Service Committee, and the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College. Albert Schweitzer College's history strongly suggests that American espionage assets helped establish the college and then used it, possibly with the knowledge and even cooperation of some of its religious supporters in the Unitarian Church movement and those who worked for the college in Switzerland. One leading Unitarian who worked closely with both U.S. intelligence and the military in the '40s and '50s was President of the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College, exactly when Lee Harvey Oswald applied. That same intelligence connected Unitarian worked with a second influential Unitarian to help control U.S. space programs, including the U 2 overflights, and in the '60s, that intelligence connected Unitarian fronted for a major CIA proprietary. Those who set policy for Albert Schweitzer College were, therefore, elite members of the establishment and allies of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald registered to attend Albert Schweitzer College and therefore became a direct link between the college and American intelligence. Whoever masterminded the Oswald college action was knowledgeable about both the OSS's and the CIA's use of Quakers, officials of the World Council of Churchs, and Unitarians as contacts, assets, and informants (often as double agents) AND about the FBI's responsibility in tracking down and identifying Soviet illegals and double agents. Oswald was, therefore, a creature of someone in American counterintelligence who possessed precisely that double body of knowledge. At the same time that Albert Schweitzer College was extending its international recruiting effort, both the Soviet and American Illegals and False Identity programs were operating. For those espionage groups, Lee Harvey Oswald initially looked like a candidate for their intelligence operations. But Oswald was a stunningly imperfect False Identity/Illegals prospect. A faulty False Identity operation had apparently been carried out using Lee Harvey Oswald and run by a branch of American intelligence. Oswald's imperfections were certain to trip counterespionage a

Arrogance as a specific constellation of affect, fantasy, and behavior has received little attention in psychoanalysis. This is striking in light of the enormous amount of literature accumulated on the related phenomenon of narcissism. Rectifying this omission, the book in your hands addresses arrogance from multiple perspectives. Among the vantage points employed are psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural anthropology, fiction, as well as clinical work with children and adults. The result is a harmonious gestalt of insight that is bound to enhance the clinician's attunement to the covert anguish of those afflicted with arrogance.

This book explores the notion of arrogance from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective, and examines its importance in the consulting room and the wider world. Starting from the writings of Freud and Bion, Civitarese explores how much our inner and outer worlds may be shaped by arrogance, both our own and that of others. The author proposes that much of psychological suffering can be explained by non-recognition, of our own needs and desires, or those of others. It can be argued that arrogance is a symptom of lack of mutual recognition and in itself a significant obstacle to psychic growth. This book is an interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy, which offers a non-reductive view of arrogance to make visible the psychological suffering it conceals. With a broad psychoanalytic basis, On Arrogance will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, scholars in humanities and anyone wishing to broaden their understanding of arrogance in clinical work and beyond.

Winner • National Council of Teachers of English - George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language The “philosopher of truth” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker) returns with a clear-eyed and timely critique of our culture’s narcissistic obsession with thinking that “we” know and “they” don’t. Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet—where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them—has contributed to the rampant spread of “intellectual arrogance.” In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us. Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell and imposing them on a cybernetic future they could not have possibly even imagined, Lynch delves deeply into three core ideas that explain how we’ve gotten to the way we are: • our natural tendency to be overconfident in our knowledge; • the tribal politics that feed off our tendency; • and the way the outrage factory of social media spreads those politics of arrogance and blind conviction. In addition to identifying an ascendant “know-it-all-ism” in our culture, Lynch offers practical solutions for how we might start reversing this dangerous trend—from rejecting the banality of emoticons that rarely reveal insight to embracing the tenets of Socrates, who exemplified the humility of admitting how little we often know about the world, to the importance of dialogue if we want to know more. With bracing and deeply original analysis, Lynch holds a mirror up to American culture to reveal that the sources of our fragmentation start with our attitudes toward truth. Ultimately, Know-It-All Society makes a powerful new argument for the indispensable value of truth and humility in democracy.

Why the British forces fought so badly in World War II and who was to blame Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood and Poppycock overturned the myths that surround the First World War. Now he challenges our assumptions about the Second World War in this brilliant, caustic narrative that exposes just how close Britain came to losing. He reveals how Winston Churchill bears a heavy responsibility for the state of our forces in 1939, and how his interference in military operations caused a string of disasters. The reputations of some of our most famous generals are also overturned: above all, Montgomery, whose post-war stature owes more to his skill with a pen than talent for command. But this is not just a story of personalities. Gordon Corrigan investigates how the British, who had the biggest and best army in the world in 1918, managed to forget everything they had learned in just twenty years. The British invented the tank, but in 1940 it was the Germans who showed the world how to use them. After we avoided defeat, but the slimmest of margins, it was a very long haul to defeat Hitler's army, and one in which the Russians would ultimately bear the heaviest burden.

The #1 NewYork Times bestselling author of Bias exposes the culture of narrow-minded elitism in the media-and reveals what must be done to change it. In December of 2001, Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg charged the mainstream media with slanting the news and created a firestorm with his controversial bestseller Bias. Now Goldberg goes beyond identifying the media's partiality and explains how the slanting of the news is all but inevitable in the current climate-and why the media's stars continue to deny the industry's condition. In this fascinating report, Goldberg lays out his rallying cry, unafraid to name names, and prescribes the difficult remedies that

What is the arrogance cycle? We’ve just lived through it. As market bubbles build, our confidence level rises (dis)proportionately. Everyone wants in on the action. We want to believe Wall Street, and once we do, the inevitable happens. Like Dr. Frankenstein breathing life into inanimate flesh, investment professionals sought ever more novel ways to create wealth. The only problem was that it was all artificial. In this book, Michael Farr examines the forces at work on individuals and markets and explains in clear, concise, layman’s terms how we got to where we are. Farr focuses on individual factors—such as rampant consumerism, a sense of entitlement, narcissism, resentment toward the upper class—that combined to create the perfect economic storm. By consulting with leading psychologists and relaying first-hand experience with investment clients, he provides a case study of the arrogant investor. In reviewing failed enterprises like Enron, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns, as well as the illegal activities of Bernie Madoff and others through the lens of arrogance, the book sheds light on those disasters and offers a means to detect the insidious presence of arrogance so that in the future we can contain the damage before it spreads.